No One Gets Out Alive (32 page)

As immobile as the subject of her appalled scrutiny, Stephanie watched the body without blinking and clenched her fist around the knife handle until it hurt her hand. There was nowhere else to
run inside the ground floor flat. If the thing on the bed moved she would have to . . . have to use the knife on it.

But if it’s not alive, what use is a knife?

The dark figure remained inert upon the bed. From what she could see from the door, it wore black trousers, inside of which the legs looked short and unappealingly thin. The ankles had collapsed
inside patterned socks. A windbreaker was zipped up right under the figure’s chin, the head covered by a plastic hood.

Moving around the foot of the bed, close to the wall and the dressing table, Stephanie moved the candle higher to better see the occupant.

A brownish face had sunken into the hood of the anorak. A pair of large spectacles with tortoise-shell frames were still in place upon the mottled skin. What was left of the wide open eyes was
magnified through the lenses of the glasses, as was their discolouration and collapse into the eye sockets to now resemble the dried-out bodies of dead snails inside their shells. Long brown teeth,
that reminded her of a donkey’s mouth, grinned at the ceiling as if the corpse was pleased with itself.

Bennet.

The face on Fergal’s phone.
The rapist.
The man who had been put inside the flat before her lay dead on what looked like a grandmother’s bed from the 1980s.

Stephanie moved to the curtains. Death had been caught amongst the fetid folds and floral patterns of the drapes and she coughed to clear her airways of the scents of stale decomposition. She
clawed them aside to find pine boards screwed into the walls.

Growling with frustration she hammered the side of one fist against the wood, which returned a hollow sound while the board did not even rattle in its secure moorings.

She tied one curtain back to the wall, using the ostentatious gold and tasselled tie that hung from a brass wall hook. When she looked to see how many screws she would have to get out of the
sheet of wood to reach the window pane, she noticed the marks in one corner of the board. Someone had tried to get out before her, using what looked like their teeth. Vague black stains surrounded
a patch of wood that had been gnawed, and by a person positioned on their knees.

Stephanie stepped away from the windows and closed her eyes for a moment. She wondered why Bennet had been put inside here; how badly he’d offended Fergal to deserve such a fate.

Had they killed him? Those things out there?

Stephanie looked at the bedroom door she had come through and couldn’t recall her legs and arms ever feeling as weak as they did now.
Did they need doors? Or can they just
rise?

As if her thoughts were contagious, she heard a rustle of what sounded like nylon.

Heart thumping the roof of her mouth, she turned quickly. When the candle flame settled, she raised the candle higher above the foot of the bed. The desiccated thing in the anorak still grinned
with dirty teeth, and the sightless and collapsed eyes were still fixed upon the ceiling. But had one arm moved? The right arm, the one closest to the window? She couldn’t remember whether
the withered brownish hand had been in that position before, held so close to the body. The hand was also missing a little finger and the removal had not been neat.

She had imagined the rustling noise.
That is all, that is all, that is all, that is all.

Stephanie turned to the window, repeatedly glancing at the corpse as she exchanged the knife for the screwdriver. She slipped the screwdriver head into the first screw and used what felt like
all of her remaining energy to get the screw to budge. And it did, or she thought it did, about one millimetre. There were at least a dozen screws to be loosened. How would she reach those at the
top?

She collapsed against the wood and began hammering a fist against the surface. She called out, ‘Help! Help me! Fire! Fire! Fire!’ Her hand hurt, but she bit down on the pain and
continued to beat the wood because her life depended on being heard.

Beyond the wood a car swished past, moving quickly. No one in a vehicle could possibly hear her and there were never any pedestrians in the street; in fact, she had not seen one during her
journeys to and from the house, bus stop and local shop. But there was a neighbour, there were curb crawlers, the punters who came here for sex; one of them might hear her . . .

Stephanie stopped banging the wooden boards. Turned to the bed. Turned to face the awful thing that had just sat up.

When Bennet grunted Stephanie screamed.

She ran across the pink room to the doorway. Her hands bumped around the door handle. She was carrying too many things: knife, candle, screwdriver. She could not get purchase on the round door
handle.

She dropped the screwdriver, put the knife between her teeth, turned the handle, opened the door. Glanced over her shoulder at the noise of bed springs, but instantly wished she had not. The
figure on the bed swung thin legs over one side of the mattress and hissed with excitement.

Stephanie slammed the bedroom door behind herself. The speed of her exit put out the candle.

Turning about, in the absolute darkness of the black room, she felt her body shake, and not just from the sudden freeze and stagnant odour of corruption she had plunged herself back into; terror
that threatened to become a seizure had taken hold of her limbs.

With near useless hands she retrieved the box of matches from the front pocket of her hooded top. Slid the box open, withdrew one match. Others dropped and scattered across the floor at her
feet. She shut the box.

Against the other side of the door the dead thing in the windbreaker turned the handle and pushed.

‘God, God, God,’ she muttered at the darkness.

He ain’t in here no more.

Stephanie struck the match she held. It flared alight.

She whimpered when she saw all four chairs drawn back from the black table in anticipation of guests.

Nothing was sitting in them, yet. But whatever was inside the little wooden box upon the long sideboard, hidden behind the purple curtain, began to beat out a muffled rhythm. And into her mind
flashed an image of small black hands banging a leather-skinned drum.

Old hair . . . black horse’s tail . . . wiry hair, doll hair . . . leather skin . . . little black hands beating a drum with a stick.

She dropped the match when it burned her fingers. Back into darkness she sank with the sound of a drum thumping inside her ears.

Using the tatters of her concentration she fished another match out of the box; there were not many left.

The door handle stopped swivelling in the small of her back, and Bennet stopped pushing at the door. But he had not gone because she could still hear the sound of his odious breathing: fast
breathing that comes from arousal, from delight. But why had he stopped trying to get out?

As if summoned by the drum, there was a shuffling sound upon the floor of the black room which tore her attention away from Bennet.

Something not wrapped in polythene, something heavy and yet soft, was moving through the darkness that engulfed her. Whatever produced the susurration, this sliding, was concealed by the broad
drapery of the black tablecloth. A small mercy and one she was sure would be short lived.

Stephanie suffered the sensation that the darkness about her was filling and expanding with motion. She flinched back tighter to the door, afraid something might be closing in on her face, and
struck a match against the box.

No spark, just the sensation of crumbling close to her fingertips.

The next match she tried flared and briefly spat, then sputtered extinct. She dropped it and pulled out what she realized was the second to last match.

This match ignited. Before the flare retracted, she saw movement on the far side of the room, near the head of the table. There was definitely motion, but she could not see what was responsible
for stirring the darkness.

Stephanie glanced at the wooden box on the sideboard; the purple curtain was still drawn while the muffled beat thumped inside.

She dipped the candle wick inside the match’s flame. Waited for the trembling light to struggle and to grow and to reveal what new and, perhaps, final horror awaited what was left of her
mind.

Once the wick caught, Stephanie looked to the door that led into the kitchen as if it offered some hope of salvation.

Gas yourself. Start a fire.

At the furthest reach of the candle’s flickering flame, she detected the vague outline of a shape against the far wall, one almost as dark as the paintwork. A silhouette rising from the
floor in a gliding motion. From a spasm of renewed terror her head shook, her mouth twitched, her breath condensed about her face. ‘Dad. Daddy. Dad,’ she muttered, as if he were able to
come into the room when called upon to save her.

Up and off the floor the thing moved, as though the lower half were serpentine and the ceiling its intended destination. Stephanie screamed and threw the candle at the movement. It missed and
hit the far wall. But as the flame arced across the room she glimpsed what might have been a tatty black head, close to the ceiling, and a pair of shrivelled arms beneath.

Maggie. Black Maggie. Maggie. Black Maggie.

She heard the voices inside her head. Not her own voice, but other voices. Lots of other voices. Voices that now travelled over the ceiling as she fled beneath them and across the room towards
her memory of where the kitchen door had been.

Round and round and round the voices went.

Up and up and up the black thing slid to be among the voices calling out its name upon the ceiling.

The drum beat grew louder.

Stephanie batted her hands across the wall, whimpering in her blindness and in her frustration that she could not find the wood of the door, because her hands were now sliding across wet
bricks.

The blackness was inside her lungs; she had inhaled too much of it, drawn the darkness inside her chest and through the chambers of her heart like dirty smoke. A taste of water rank with ashes
and burned bone filled her mouth.

She turned around and fumbled the match box out of her pocket and then scraped the last match out of the box. With fingers she could barely feel she struck the match against the wrong side of
the box. Then turned the match box over and tried again.

The match flared.

In the air, near the ceiling, a pair of small white eyes, inside a face she was glad she could not see, closed. But when the head slowly moved down and towards her, as if to investigate her
presence, it shook what might have been hair with an emotion that resembled joy.

She turned her own face away from the thing above her, glimpsed the kitchen door behind her shoulder. Reached for the door handle. Stepped out of the black room and slammed the kitchen door
shut.

Inside the darkness hysteria finally came. Madness too. She welcomed madness.

In the surge of a mindlessness born of sustained terror, the violence of her screams took her into a space she had never known before, but had occasionally sensed in the wings of her mind. When
she came close to being conscious of this state, she suppressed any flickers of awareness, in case she departed chaos.

Round and round in the darkness of the kitchen she turned and spun and unravelled herself and cut at the nothingness with her knife. Slashed above her head where a face might hang, and down
below where something could be crawling towards her legs.

Against cabinets she banged herself but ignored the pain. Over the little table she sprawled only to right her body and to whip the knife through the air, at head height, should anything be
closing in.

She picked up a chair and hurled it through the absence; it seemed to travel a long way before smashing the glass out of a cabinet door. She sent the second chair after it.

Drawers were emptied and implements thrown anywhere and everywhere. Some of the things she threw bounced off the walls and struck her body. Cupboards were pawed at. Their contents were released
with her screams, to accompany the flight of objects through the lightless place, through the end of the world and through the final reaches of herself.

When she could no longer raise her tired arms, she slumped to her knees and asked the darkness for death.

‘Now. Come on. Now. Now.’

There would be some pain and then she wanted black. Nothing mattered any more. She didn’t want to think or remember anything. She just wanted to go.

‘I want it now. Now. Now. Get it over with, you bitch.’

Her energy, her spirit, her life was spent. She was glad to be rid of it; the struggle for survival was a pain she no longer wanted.

And then she went quiet for a time and wondered if she was already dead, and if a new tenant, some fragrant girl from Bulgaria or Latvia, was lying stiff with fright inside an old bed while
listening to Stephanie’s cries in the night.

She didn’t know. But she didn’t think she was dead. Bennet had looked very thin on that pink bed. So perhaps he had starved to death inside here, his last days a relentless torment
as visitor after visitor came rustling and sliding about him in the darkness.

And from the moment he’d shoved her inside here, this was what Fergal had been waiting for: the crescendo. He had waited for her cries.

Was he out there now?

Stephanie crawled across the broken things and found the door she had first come through; it felt so long ago, when she had been another person, someone who cared about life. She pushed herself
up the door. Struck the surface with both hands. Grimaced at the darkness.

She saw their faces inside her mind, their simian faces, clever and thrusting. She saw again the weasel-quick eyes. Faces fronting minds erased of compassion, of decency, of humanity. She could
hear Knacker’s voice, which in turn became the memory of a ghost’s incapacity and cries.